


Bored (at a London Music)

by beyonces_fiancee



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Edwardian, Alternate Universe - Victorian, Bored Sherlock, Class Differences, Classical Music, First Names as Proxy for Intimacy, Inspired by Poetry, London, Look but Don't Touch, M/M, Temptation, not for long though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-26
Updated: 2016-10-26
Packaged: 2018-08-27 05:46:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8389549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beyonces_fiancee/pseuds/beyonces_fiancee
Summary: Impulsively Sherlock said ‘Wait,’ and seized the cuff of his jacket. The man looked down at the place where Sherlock’s hand held him, then up to look him in the eye.

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Watson, sir.’

  ‘No,’ said Sherlock. ‘Your Christian name.’
Fin de siècle AU, set in 1900. Sherlock is bored at a tiresome supper in town, until someone catches his attention.





	

**Author's Note:**

> A hundred thanks to [breathedout](https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout), period consultant beyond compare, and [oulfis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oulfis), accidental beta extraordinaire.

_What an intolerable party of starched-stiff dullards._

Sherlock could sense his mental processes starting to grind and smoke for lack of grist in the stultifying atmosphere of the drawing room. He had known he would be dining at Lord and Lady Smallwood’s; he should have taken more care to memorize the performance of the Strauss opus he had attended last week, so that he could have had something to chew over during the torturous course of the evening.

True, when in town the Smallwoods laid a lavish table, and one was generally not wholly without a simple deduction or two to make, or some minor tit-bit of political gossip, which Mycroft always lapped up. But at what cost? To sit in a room in which the air was thick with stiffness and frippery and falsehoods. Everyone present was too foolish to be worth while talking to, but not foolish enough to think themself a wit, and amuse in that way. Not two words together expressed anything interesting, or real, or true. And always, always, the infernal sawing or howling of whatever Royal Opera rejects Lady Smallwood’s lack of discernment had induced her to select for the evening’s music.

Lady Smallwood glanced back at him approvingly, undoubtedly thinking what a prize she had landed in securing his attendance. Her gown was an impeccable example of Paris fashion two years past. He might have predicted it of her. His eyes half-lidded and he retreated to the refuge of his memory palace. If he were lucky, they would think him as engrossed in the music as only a connoisseur could be.

He found himself ruminating on the footman who had attracted his notice. He would look well half-dressed and groaning helplessly beneath the attentions of Sherlock’s mouth. The able shape of his hands spoke of their facility with both hard labour and intimate detail work; indeed, now that Sherlock’s thoughts had caught on that last idea, he found it difficult to think of anything else. Now, what had his name been?

* * *

‘May I take your coat, sir?'

Sherlock shrugged off the heavy coat in the entry hall and dropped it absently into the footman’s arms. He was staring at the tasteless mis-matched paintings flanking the entrance to the drawing room: on the right, a sterile landscape by Turner that looked as though the painter had never in his life seen the sun; on the left, a rococo mess of fat-cheeked shepherds making flower crowns. In one corner of the shepherd painting he noticed an equally fat-cheeked spaniel with a pink silk bow tied round its neck, and let out a bark of laughter.

‘Sir?’

He turned to look the footman in the face, who had returned from hanging the coat and was regarding him with a deferential, apprehensive attitude. Perhaps he thought he had failed in his duty.

‘It’s nothing, my good man,’ said Sherlock. ‘A mere fancy.’ He dug into the pocket of his trousers and found a few pence to serve as a vail. ‘For your trouble.’

Now that he was paying greater attention, the man was rather a good-looking sort: well-built, stocky frame, square and capable hands, an honest serious face with a clear brow, and bright clear eyes suspended on the sea-washed precipice of a wholly unnameable color.

‘Thank you, sir.’ The eyelids with their blond lashes flickered slightly, just once. Then the bright gaze lowered again and the head turned and the shoulders thick and taut in their livery made as though to resume his work.

Impulsively Sherlock said ‘Wait,’ and seized the cuff of his jacket. The man looked down at the place where Sherlock’s hand held him, then up to look him in the eye. His features betrayed no evidence of curiosity or alarm; undoubtedly he had had all manner of strange treatment, in the Smallwoods’ employ.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Watson, sir.’

‘No,’ said Sherlock. ‘Your Christian name.’

At that, the still face broke its stillness, and Watson’s brow softened with no little surprise, and he looked quite approachable. Beautiful, even. He cleared his throat with a short, curt noise and said, ‘John, sir.’

‘John.’ Sherlock could have expected something like that. A conventional name for a servant in a conventional household. Yet how well it sounded coming from between John’s lips as he spoke it. Just as the green of a leaf is not new or surprising when one comes across it, yet the more right for all that—alive with its own, true greenness.

‘Yes, sir.’

Sherlock was suddenly struck by a foolish wish to touch the sunburnt skin below the cuff of the jacket, at the peak of John’s wrist-bone. He dropped his grip and averted his gaze. He could hear the first movement beginning; he would shortly be missed.

He said, ‘Thank you, Watson.’

A minute inclination of the blond head, accompanied by a slight smile and quirk of the eyebrow, and the automatic reply came: ‘The pleasure is mine, sir.’

* * *

And now this miserable tone-deaf yowling hack of a violinist was making his life a hell, and the idiots gathered to applaud him were murmuring amongst themselves how ‘remarkable’ and ‘sweetly pretty’ it all was.

From the row in front of him, the somber voice of Lord Smallwood was raised in effortful mirth. ‘Mr Holmes, you will have to tell us all about the artistic merits of the preceding section. Your stormy brow seems to tell an ominous tale.’

Sherlock responded, but he was completely inattentive to the substance of the reply he made. He had suddenly become aware of the silent presence of someone at his right shoulder. Sherlock glanced up and back. Perfectly smooth and unobtrusive, his expression bland and noncommittal, John offered a tray of champagne in cut glasses. Sherlock’s intake of breath was silent. He shifted his weight to lean closer.

The chatter was dying as the next movement began, and the faces of the audience that had craned to watch him reply to Lord Smallwood were one and all turned away again, toward the musicians. He and John were suddenly in an envelope of privacy, only as wide as their two bodies standing shoulder to shoulder.

Moving deliberately, Sherlock reached for a glass, and in so doing brushed the apex of his thumb across the back of John’s knuckles where he held the tray. There was blond hair there, too, growing fine and straight and silver-pale against the tanned skin. He took up a glass, resting it in the circle of his thumb and forefinger, and began to withdraw his hand.

As he did so, he observed the slight trembling of John’s lips. John’s eyes were discreetly lowered, his expression still utterly blank. Sherlock stared intently at every part of John’s face. Every movement he made seemed to take an age as his hand withdrew, lowered slightly, as the backs of his knuckles made contact with John’s and stroked softly upward in a tiny motion toward John’s wrist.

For an instant, John glanced down at him, the shock in his face infinitesimal but, to one who knew how to observe, clear as daylight. Sherlock’s sidewise gaze caught the glance, and they looked at one another.

They both held still as stone for a breath, another breath, another, and yet another. Their faces were both turned forward, as though the piano trio held any charm whatever. Against Sherlock’s thumb, a raised vein in the back of John’s hand pulsed with the faint ticking of his blood. Sherlock looked up at John, almost out of the corner of his eye, still holding the champagne glass aloft; and John looked back at him. He made no move to draw away. He only met Sherlock’s gaze, his expression one of disciplined impassive calm, but nonetheless thrumming with tension, twitching on the point of—what? A smile, a word? A desire to touch?

Sherlock’s raised hand had begun to tremble with the strain. His cock was swollen against the restriction of his trousers. The collar of his evening-dress coat became damp with sweat. And still they were as though of stone, and the room seemed to fade and fade and everything around them to evanesce into the candle-light, and the trio played on.

* * *

He had hardly tasted the Chanoine Frères Brut as it rolled glittering over his tongue. He had hardly noticed the accommodating claptrap that had spilled out of his mouth to Lady Smallwood seated at his right hand during the supper afterward. Going home in the icy night, indeed, he hardly remembered the sound of the poorly-tuned caterwauling that had so annoyed him in the confined space of the drawing room.

What he thought of as he walked home was that footman.

The baritone murmur of the man's voice discreetly pitched as he served on the right and cleared on the left. The heat of his thick-muscled thigh, perceptible against Sherlock’s cheek when he had leaned his head a little closer to the green and gold fabric of his livery trousers. The smell of his perspiration, at the place where a single bead had trickled down from beneath his shirt cuff and onto the back of Sherlock’s hand; and when the spell had been broken and John had moved away to serve the others, the place where Sherlock (he could not help it) had touched his tongue. And those eyes: steady as a rifleman’s, bright as a bridegroom’s.

What was the man’s name… yes, John. That was it. Of course.

John.

**Author's Note:**

> Two rows of foolish faces blent   
> In two blurred lines; the compliment,   
> The formal smile, the cultured air,   
> The sense of falseness everywhere.   
> Her ladyship superbly dressed —   
> I liked their footman, John, the best.
> 
> The tired musicians’ ruffled mien,   
> Their whispered talk behind the screen,   
> The frigid plaudits, quite confined   
> By fear of being unrefined.   
> His lordship's grave and courtly jest —   
> I liked their footman, John, the best.
> 
> Remote I sat with shaded eyes,  
>  Supreme attention in my guise,  
>  And heard the whole laborious din,   
> Piano, 'cello, violin;   
> And so, perhaps, they hardly guessed   
> I liked their footman, John, the best.
> 
> _Horatio Brown (1900)_


End file.
